We have a dumpster coming next week, and I have never been more excited about anything in my entire life. We are going to be tearing apart or taking down all sorts of shit that has been slightly annoying but not annoying enough to actually deal with during the fifteen years we have lived in this house. This metal post in the back yard has never had a birdhouse on it. You can see the rotten remains of it on the top part of the post on the ground back there, but we never bothered to do the work to tear the thing out because it’s cemented in place. It’s just been sitting there being an eyesore. Well, I cut a couple of chunks off of it today in preparation for either cutting it flush to the ground or digging the cement chunk out next week— I wanted to make sure the blade for my reciprocating saw would actually cut through the thing, and it looks like the answer’s yes.
Meanwhile, the size of modern cars means that my Kia and my wife’s car only somewhat fit in the garage, and these cabinets have been in my way for years. I tore the doors off today and we’ll take the cabinets down tomorrow. To the garbage with you! We’re going to order a standalone cabinet or two from Lowe’s that will use the space better and actually allow me to get out of my car without turning sideways.
There’s a workbench we’ve never used in the basement that’s going to go too, and we’ll finally repaint the bedroom tomorrow and start rearranging in there. We’ve got electricians coming in for new lighting in the basement, too, and we might tear down some paneling down there too just for the hell of it.
That slight pinkish hueis how we know that the drywall compound hasn’t finished drying yet; this needs another sanding before it’s ready to paint, but considering how it looked a couple of weeks ago this represents significant improvement. We meant to get this done last weekend but neither of us were feeling well so it got put off to yesterday and today; I capped off that loose wire and stuck it into a box (It meets code now! It’s even straight and flush to the wall!) and we both pitched in on the sanding. Bek did the mudding. Hopefully next weekend we’ll get to throw some furniture around, and then there’s a dumpster coming for the first few days of Spring Break, during which I will have to be restrained from throwing away everything we own. Do we need a dining table? The oven? Come on, let’s just put ’em in the dumpster.
Seriously, we have like half a dozen projects planned for Spring Break (most of them involve destroying stuff, which is exciting!) plus a handful of contractors and other specialists coming out to either take care of other things we’re not smart enough for or give us estimates for them. If we get more than half of the shit we’re thinking about taken care of it’s going to be a very successful Spring Break.
My other project today was … filling a hole in front of the house, which may be a post all on its own. I never realized that it was possible to be bad at filling in a hole, or to fill in a hole incorrectly, but I appear to have done both of those things. One way or another the current phase of the Fill The God Damn Hole project is complete; the only question is whether we need to move to Fill The God Damn Hole, Phase 3: In Which I Learn to Pour Concrete, Because Fuck This.
Patching, repainting and putting the trim back in place is gonna wait to next weekend, and rearranging the room until the weekend after that, but that job was a lot easier than either of us thought it was going to be.
Took the old garage lights to the dump— did I mention we installed new garage lights?– got our taxes done, and knocked a couple of test holes in a wall today for a “weekend project” we have in mind that no doubt will take six months to finish. I feel like that’s a Saturday, right?
I have four letters of recommendation to write tomorrow, all for the same scholarship, and the building can only nominate one of the kids who apply to the next round. I am supposed to send the letters directly to the school counselor and I am genuinely tempted to write a real letter for the clear best choice and have the rest of the letters say “I choose that other kid.” I’m not going to do that, of course; I’ll make the best case I can for each of the kids, but I think the choice is pretty clear at least among these four. I think the world will forgive me if I use a common framework for the four letters, though. Hopefully. After that I have a week of lesson plans to write– for some reason I really want this week settled before I get to school Monday morning– and after that a combination of threats and prayers toward nature, because apparently despite it being nearly 70 degrees earlier this week we have a winter storm headed our way again? And, no. There are not going to be any more winter storms. Indiana had tornadoes yesterday, and it is an ironclad rule of the universe that tornadoes and snow cannot coexist in the same week. Just … no. I threatened to kill God on Bluesky the other day and it received a startlingly positive response; nobody wants to make me follow through here, right?
Today is the 61st anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination, and while I freely admit that I did think when I purchased the above book about Malcolm X that I would read it during Black History Month, specifically starting it today was a happy accident. I could tell you without looking it up that Malcolm was killed in late February of 1965, so I knew it was soon if we hadn’t just missed it, but if I’d gotten the 21st right it would have been a lucky guess. I’m startled at how fast February has flown by; I have about 30 books I need to read in the next seven days, and my wife and I ought to figure out what we’re doing for our eighteenth anniversary at the end of the week.
Yeah. Eighteen years. I am so old that I have been married for eighteen years. Madness.
I’m pleased to announce that the sense of impending dread that most teachers associate with Sundays is not currently afflicting me. I’ve been sickish all day again, as has been typical of Sundays for a while now, but beyond that, we’re prepped for class tomorrow and we’re all good. I actually got a major (sort of) task done today; our mailbox has only been tenuously attached to its base since we installed it after buying the house in 2011 and I finally bought a piece of wood of an appropriate side to attach the thing properly today. Fourteen and a half years, y’all, but the mailbox no longer wiggles when you open it. I am amazed that in all this time we’ve never had a complaint from a mail carrier; I am sure that he will notice the difference when the mail gets delivered tomorrow. Maybe there will be a thank-you note in there! It would be nice.
I also sent out the first of my roughly-biweekly parent newsletters and got a barrage of responses in rapid succession, which I suppose I should see as a good thing but which might actually have the effect of decreasing how often I send such things out. Or maybe in the future I’ll just make sure I’m somewhere where I can instantly reply to a ton of emails if necessary.
That means that it’s 7:12 PM and, since this blog post is written and my Duolingo obligations are fulfilled, I’m free to spend the rest of the night reading or playing video games. Huzzah!
If you’ve been around here for any length of time– five days would do it– you have certainly seen at least a variant of this picture, my four Nice Bookshelves that are in my living room and are currently dedicated at least mostly to series fiction. The bottom shelves are an exception, partially, but whatever.
A few weeks ago I discovered what I thought was a spectacular sale at the furniture store I worked at– not quite, but almost, half off of these exact same bookshelves. So this has happened:
Hello, Gideon. Hello, The Boy’s toes.
So we’re back to having seven bookshelves in this room again, which I … think is probably the end of it, because of the extra room the sectional takes up compared to the sofa we had before? But who knows. At any rate, these are not precisely identical to the bookshelves we had before, because they weren’t on sale– these come unassembled, and that’s why they were cheaper. That rather tedious process has been my job for the last few days. That said, once put together, they look identical, and they’re quite solidly put together as well– these are absolutely not Wal-Mart $40 specials like the other bookshelves in the house and I have no reason to not believe they’ll last just as long as the ones we spent more money on.
We used my wife’s nice big new car to deliver a shitton of styrofoam and cardboard to our local recycling/hazardous waste facility today and I’ve got all the shelves where I want them. I have two days of vacation left and by the time school starts back up I want my books organized properly again. Right now the theme is “only fiction in the living room” and “only nonfiction in the library … other than the leatherbounds,” but we’ll see.
I’ll post more pictures once everything is properly organized.
The new bed is fully in place, and the new mattress is going to arrive tomorrow, so depending on how long it takes for it to decompress from the tiny box they’ve stuffed it into he ought to be sleeping back in here by mid-week next week at the latest. I have a couple of observations about putting this bed together, if you don’t mind indulging me:
First, the build quality of the bed itself is really impressive. The whole thing is steel and decent-quality particle board; there was a small dent in one of the pieces of wood because the box took a hit at some point during the delivery process, and we’re going to see if we can get them to send us a new one, but I was able to hide it and it’s not going to make any kind of difference structurally. Everything went together really easily, all the predrilled holes in the metal pieces were in the right places, the welded joints feel strong, and once I went through and tightened all the bolts (suggestion: install everything with your hands to finger-tight and then go back with a drill once you’re certain everything fits right) it just feels rock-solid. It’s not making any noises or squeaking or anything and it just feels like it should have cost more than the slightly-over-$300 we paid for it. There may have been a bag of screws missing from the hardware box– I say “may have been” because it’s entirely possible we lost it during the unpacking process, but I really don’t think that’s what happened, because I was being careful. At any rate, a trip to Lowe’s solved the problem for an extra $5 worth of screws. Whatever.(*)
Let’s talk about the instructions, though. And if you think I’m about to complain about something translated from Chinese, think again. There are almost no actual words in the instructions, I assume specifically because they wanted to avoid translation issues. That said? The instructions suck. They get piece numbers wrong a few times– one page had a couple of part numbers handwritten in it, and even then they were wrong– and there are a couple of deeper issues as well.
One, this bed is reversible, which one would think would be a selling point– by which I mean that the stairs can go either on the right or the left of the bed itself, and once you figure out what you’re looking at it’s easy to figure out that, okay, if this goes here instead of here, that’s why this seems to have extra holes in it. But the instructions never mention this! In fact, the diagrams show the stairs on both sides and in both orientations at various points with no indication that anything has changed, which as one could imagine, can lead to some confusion to those not paying careful attention. I am proud to say that I made only one build error– that bottom three-part rail on the right side was initially put in upside-down, which was not the instructions’ fault and was easily fixed. But I’m generally pretty good at this kind of thing. If you’re not used to it, the moving stairs are gonna be a problem.
And, well, there’s this, too. Take a second and look at this diagram carefully before you keep reading:
Look at the bottom part of the diagram. Am I going blind, or is there some sort of haywire M.C. Escher shit going on with the directionality of the bottom third of this diagram? Like, these lines don’t line up correctly, right? This is apparently looking up from underneath the stairs, and I can’t put my finger on what’s wrong but I also just can’t parse it.
The good news is that all you really need to be realizing from this diagram is 1) put feet in the feet-holes, 2) screw all of the pieces of wood onto the frame, and 3) put those little brackets on the side of the hangar cubby, which– right– I did screw two things up, because I used the wrong bolts there and, uh, had to have my wife get two more from Lowe’s. But this fucking diagram is terrifying if you’re already not confident about how to put this type of thing together, and I’m genuinely not convinced that the actual diagram itself matches physical reality properly.
One way or another, though, the boy has a new bed, and once the mattress goes in and I get his whiteboard put up on the side there and, Christ, some more lighting– note that I had to pull some of my spotlights from my year of teaching at home to help me out in the top picture– I think the room will be good until he decides the trees and Pokémon are too little-kiddy and we need to repaint again. One way or another, I hope he likes the loft, because it’s never leaving that room.
(*) My wife, who actually got the job of having to buy the right screws, might disagree with my “whatever” here, just for the record.
We have been on a hell of a tear around here lately; the boy’s new loft bed isn’t finished yet and the mattress won’t be here until Monday anyway, but we tore apart his old bed (storage, with a storage headboard as well, so it was quite a job) first and moved that into the garage. Today also involved reinstalling the trim I removed yesterday so that the new refrigerator could be moved in, then putting the door back, then hanging up some smoke detectors that have been in the Wrong Place for literal years, so we got all kinds of stuff done at the Siler homestead today. Tomorrow I’ll put the desk together and add the stairs on the side and then the bed will be done, and sometime in the next couple of days there’s going to be some painting in the living room. Also, now that I’m an electrician, there’s a really good chance that our front and back porch lights are not long for this world, because I’ve never liked them.
I know I promised a pillow review. Probably not tomorrow, since I’m sure I’ll be posting “after” pictures, so let’s say Monday. I promise soon, though.
